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Perhaps it’s time we all think about helping our students understand plagiarism, responsibility, and copyright violation. All of us. The use of Teachers-Pay-Teachers often shows teachers taking work from published authors and repurposing it (making a new anchor chart, for instance) and selling the material. When those teachers are confronted, some have responded, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what plagiarism meant.” Though that’s disappointing, perhaps from some it is true.

Most importantly, we can’t go back to schools thinking students have not watched what is now happening at the RNC. Some will come back questioning. Some will come back convinced they too can do the same and then just repeatedly claim, “no, it’s not plagiarism” or “it’s not my fault” or “it was 93% true.” And some will simply come back confused.

So, what are the conversations that can be had? I think there are three – moving from most concrete to most complex. You should decide which ones are most appropriate for the students you teach.

The Easiest: What Plagiarism Looks Like
1. The side-by-side video and text comparison of First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech and Mrs. Melania Trump’s speech will allow students to have a conversation about plagiarism, attributing sources, paraphrasing without attribution. Because the focus was home, family, children, and big dreams, we should be able to do this as an a-political conversation. While there are many sites showing the comparison, I like this one. It lets you listen to one speech, while the words in question appear. Then you hear the next speech and the repeated words are highlighted. Kids can quickly see the exact lifting and then can have a conversation about paraphrasing. Then you might ask “Even though the Obama administration has said it has no comment, how do you think Mrs. Obama might feel?” For kids ready to have a more complex conversation, there’s the added layer that Melania claims to have written the speech mostly herself while others point out that big speeches such as this are handled by speech writers. Who did the plagiarizing? Who’s responsibility is it to check for this? Who should have stepped up and claimed the mistake and then assured it wouldn’t happen again?

Harder: Taking Responsibility
2. President Obama plagiarized his good friend Governor Deval Patrick in a speech when he (Obama) was running against Clinton (the primary). When the similarities in the two speeches were pointed out to Obama, he immediately said he “should have given Patrick credit.”

He explained that he and Patrick had discussed Obama using the same structure and comments for his own speech and he should have said that in the speech. Patrick went on TV confirming that he had given Obama permission. Still, at the moment that Obama used the material without attribution, it was plagiarism and when pointed out, Obama admitted wrongdoing. Students (by sixth grade) could easily read this article (same link as immediately above link) and then compare that to this article that shows how the RNC and Donald Trump’s campaign are responding to the current situation.

While we all know that the point isn’t to create a classroom climate of “rephrase and repent,” an honest explanation of how something happened and ownership of wrongdoing is never a bad lesson to learn.

Even Harder: Copyright Infringement and Decency
3. The entrance of Trump at the convention on Monday night to Queen’s hit “We are the Champions” was done with legal permission given to the stadium to play the music but without permission of Queen for Trump to present a situation that appears that Queen endorsed Trump. While copyright lawyers will point out that the license to play the music was given to the location and therefore anyone using the place can request the music, Queen had already reached out once to the Trump campaign and told him to stop using that song at his rallies. This particular song, with lead singer Freddie Mercury’s powerful voice, is a strange choice for Mr. Trump (or minions) to have chosen for his entrance. Freddie died of AIDS in 1991 and “many argue [he] would not have been a supporter of Trump.” The entrance of a public figure in a dramatic moment with a particular song can be seen as an endorsement of the singers. And, since Queen has already reached out and said their group does not give explicit or implicit endorsement to any politician, then one would wonder why Trump’s campaign would not honor that request. Why do something when you’ve been asked to stop?

The best article I’ve found that explains the multiple perspectives on this particular situation is here. This article certainly does give the reader the chance to be surprised, to see places where the author assumes some background knowledge, and a most importantly, places to challenge, change, or confirm thoughts. This article should be read and discussed by students grades 8 and up. It’s a complex text – more because of content and ethical considerations than vocabulary – that will certainly continue to be a part of our lives in this web-based world.

These are tough conversations to have with kids. But they should be had. It’s not a political conversation; it’s a conversation about identifying plagiarism; ways of accepting or rejecting responsibility; and, the nuances of copyright infringement and decency toward one another. Our kids need us to have these conversations with them.

In a school last week, a teacher asked if we could share with her what it is Bob Probst and I listen for when we’re assessing student conversations. “How do you know if they are talking at a surface level or really digging deeper?”

We thought it was a good question. In fact, a couple of years ago as we left a classroom, congratulating one another on the small group conversations students had conducted, we found ourselves wondering much the same thing as Bob asked the critical question, “What made their talk rigorous and what should we do next time we are with them to encourage even deeper thinking?”

He was responding to the number of times we had said (to one another) “Wow, the kids did a really good job” and “They were really super today” and “That was a great class.” Those general statements couldn’t help us actually plan what we needed to do next. They captured our excitement of the moment, but those comments couldn’t really help us think about what we should do next to encourage even deeper thinking.

So, we set about doing something that occasionally seemed silly to us – we created a checklist of behaviors we could watch for to help us identify the rigor of the conversation. We say it sometimes seemed a silly endeavor, because, of course, rigor can’t be reduced to a checklist! At the same time, though, we wanted a list of behaviors that we could watch for (listen for) as we observed student conversations. Such a list would help us move from “That was a really great conversation” to “The students were using the vocabulary of the topic and turning to the text for evidence, but are not yet (for instance) showing the patience we want as students share ideas.” Eventually we settled on a list of behaviors that became the Rigor and Talk Checklist for Literary Texts that we included in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading (and that list has been published on this blog in a previous post).

When we began working on Reading Nonfiction (and we’re counting DAYS until it is released!), we decided to rethink our checklist focusing now on what we wanted to hear in conversations about nonfiction.

Though this checklist (see below) appears in the forthcoming book, we wanted to share it here, now, so it is perhaps helpful as soon as possible. Again, we use this as we’re listening to students, noticing what it is they do well and identifying areas we need to encourage.

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My colleague Bob Probst and I have been thinking a lot about nonfiction as we work on our next book which for now is titled Notice and Note for Expository Texts, the companion to our book that focused on literary texts: Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. Part of the research for this new nonfiction book meant each of us ramped up our own volume of nonfiction reading. As a result, in the past year or so, I’ve learned a great deal about many topics including Sumerians, planets, plagues, early Civil Rights advocates, the dust bowl, volcanoes, the cotton industry, the dung beetle, World War II, photosynthesis, and wine (well, that one was for a different research project…).

For a year, at the end of each week, Bob and I would ask ourselves what we noticed about our reading of nonfiction. We wanted to focus on what we did while reading nonfiction that we didn’t do while reading fiction. What struck us both, no matter the topic, was the number of times we said to ourselves, “Really?” or “I didn’t know that.” For instance, I didn’t know that the Russians landed a probe on Mars years before the USA did. When I read that, I remember stopping and thinking, “Really?” and then doing more–going to other sites, calling my son and asking if he knew this (“Yes, Mom. It was the early 70s. Once it landed, though, it didn’t transmit images as they had hoped it would.” I hung up and looked for someone else who, too, was amazed. Luckily a neighbor’s daughter is only six years old.)

We want students aware of what they are discovering as they read. We want them to enjoy that feeling of surprise, amazement, and even skepticism. We want them to say, “Really?” So, we worked with a group of teachers in Florida and Ohio (thank you Orlando and Akron folks!) and eventually settled on this simple note-taking template that you’ll see below. You can download this blank template here.

And here’s an example of one completed by an 8th grader:

When we talked with this student, she reported, “Sometimes I read and just turn the pages to get finished. When I used this to keep notes, it was like I was really thinking about how what I was reading was telling me stuff I didn’t know. I really was like, “Really?” and it helped me keep thinking while I was reading. Now I find myself doing this even without the worksheet.”

That’s the goal of any good scaffold–to offer support until the support isn’t needed. If your students have decided that the goal of reading is to finish, then perhaps this template will help them slow down to focus on what they are learning, on what they’ve discovered that’s new to them.